


True North

by galateas



Category: Cowboy Bebop (Anime)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Identity Issues, One Shot, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:42:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27351403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galateas/pseuds/galateas
Summary: Faye had seen a travel show once where the presenter had demonstrated how a magnet held close to a compass could reverse the direction of the needle, repelling it away from true north.Since then she had often thought that her accident had wiped her out like it was that magnet, and she the needle, always spinning away from the right direction.___Things Faye wishes she knows and things she wishes she didn't.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	True North

'Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.'  
  


― Rebecca Solnit, _A Field Guide to Getting Lost_

***  
  


Faye had seen a travel show once where the presenter had demonstrated how a magnet held close to a compass could reverse the direction of the needle, repelling it away from true north. Since then she had often thought that her accident had wiped her out like it was that magnet, and she the needle, always spinning away from the right direction. Other times she thought it was the opposite, that she was the magnetic force making everything else around her wrong. It didn’t matter; she could never put it right. That was physics. 

(Faye had turned off the program before the presenter got to the part explaining how you fixed it.)

She wondered why they called it ‘true’ north anyway. What was truth? Truth was a place to be avoided. She shouldn’t care to know it or be known by it at all. 

It terrified her that there were versions of her that lived in her shipmates’ minds, that she herself could not see but to them was the whole truth of her. She could not control what those were, no matter how hard and fast she lied to them. 

  
And what was true of them to her? Sometimes she felt she knew far too much of that already. She would think back to when she had first met them and try to conjure how it had felt to see them as complete strangers. It was impossible. It was like looking at a word in a language you knew how to read and trying to reduce it back to empty symbols. You couldn’t unlearn what the symbols meant. You would always hear the word in your head. 

It made her crazy when her own face in the mirror was written in an unknown script. 

It made her crazy when Spike was walking around with his head positively full of memories and spoke like this made everything less real, like he was acting out a dream and not his actual life. Sometimes she really wanted to shake him out of that state - but wasn’t it supposed to be dangerous to wake a sleepwalker? They would freak out; they wouldn’t know where they were. Really he was as lost as she was.

Besides, she didn’t care to make it any more her business than it had already unwittingly become. It was already bad enough knowing that even in his dreams, Spike’s true north was called _Julia_. It was already bad enough how intimately Faye could now know that name, belonging to a person she had never met, when she didn’t even know her very own family name. 

With Jet things were different. He dealt in the tangible, the practical, the solvable. This was irritating in its own way. He looked at Faye sometimes like she herself was one of the problems he could solve; neatly tie up all her ends and put an official stamp on her. _Oh, you know, she’s a woman, that’s just how they are._ She was acutely aware that he had once been a cop. He spoke disparagingly of the ISSP and how corrupt it was, that it hadn’t been for him in the end, but Faye had invested a lot of stock in the saying that you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks. Too bad how often he’d say or do something to upend the theory. Cops threw out evidence that didn’t suit their narrative all the time; she could do the same right back. 

Meanwhile Ed should have been a complete mystery, with her arcane songs and sayings and her gymnastics and her lines and lines of code streaming out into the ether. Faye didn’t know anything about code, it all looked like complete gibberish to her, but she knew enough to realise that it all meant something and you couldn’t type a single character wrong without changing the whole operation. There wasn’t anything random to it. Ed may have been some kind of prodigy, or sensation, or whatever you wanted to call it; but at the end of the day she was still just a kid. It was a terrible and fearful thing to Faye how _needy_ all children were, and how open. There was almost a violence to how primal it was, to how strongly it compelled her to look away.

Which left her with the dog. The dog was the only one of them Faye thought she maybe hadn’t come anywhere close to getting. She had never seen an animal behave in the way Ein did, like he understood everything. Frankly it unnerved her. But then she’d smell his meaty breath and feel his warm little body and it was hard not to appreciate that he was still a living thing, out here in space with her. 

And at her loneliest, it was so hard not to think that about all of her shipmates. She would turn away from the big window in the bridge where her eyes had been pouring out over the stars and see them: these four points radiating out from her. Then she would think that she didn’t know anything about them at all, except that they were here with her, and she with them, and that was the only truth that mattered. 

It was some years after watching the travel program she hadn’t seen the end of, when they were lost over some sea on an unfamiliar planet with their own scrambled compass, that Faye remembered out of the blue a school sailing trip in which she had learned how to do it. 

The way you put the compass right was just to move the magnet back over it. 

That was physics. 


End file.
